


Imitation Moon

by nellasera



Series: Zutara One Shots [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: A Slice of Healing Fic, F/M, Fire Lord Zuko, Postwar AU, References to Depression, Spirit World (Avatar)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:54:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25743148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nellasera/pseuds/nellasera
Summary: It happens not when he’s trying, but when he’s asleep.Zuko knows, almost immediately, that it isn’t a regular dream.Maybe it’s all the shimmering in his vision. It’s nearly blinding, and Zuko has to cover his eyes for a while before it fades and he can finally squint ahead.Or: Katara won't stop disappearing into the Spirit World, and Fire Lord Zuko tries to retrieve her.
Relationships: Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Series: Zutara One Shots [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1993336
Comments: 8
Kudos: 81





	Imitation Moon

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I am new to the ATLA fandom. And although this is a little late, I wanted to contribute something for my first Zutara week. So behold, a weird interpretation on prompt #4: celestial. Comments/kudos are much appreciated :)

Fire Lord Zuko is sitting in one of the most tedious meetings he can possibly imagine, and the blistering summer heat certainly isn't helping the drowsiness born of his boredom.

It’s been six months since he assumed his position as Fire Lord, and it’s still strange to Zuko that he can be so terribly bored one day and hear rumors about an assassination attempt the next. Though luckily there haven't been any serious assassination attempts yet.

There’s a knock on the door, and Zuko nods to the guards to open it.

A member of his palace staff rushes in. He looks utterly terrified.

Many adjustments in the palace have been made, but Zuko is aware that the servants will need more time before they don't fear his wrath as they had to fear his father’s. “Fire Lord Zuko,” says the man in a wavering voice, bowing as low as he possibly can, “I’m so sorry to interrupt, but it is urgent.”

Zuko stands, frowning. “What is it?”

“Your visitor Sokka has sent for you. He says there is something wrong.”

Immediately, Zuko begins sweeping toward the doors. “Thank you,” he tells the guard as he passes, nodding. “We’ll continue this tomorrow,” he calls over his shoulder, toward the table full of disgruntled diplomats.

* * *

“Something is wrong,” says Sokka, touching his sister’s face.

Yes. Zuko can see it too.

Katara is not just sleeping.

She is, to the relief of both the men, breathing, but that’s the only consolation they have at the moment. Sokka told Zuko he tried shaking her awake and making loud noises, but nothing worked.

“Did something happen on your journey that may have hurt her?” Zuko asks urgently.

They only arrived yesterday, after all, and he’s hardly had a chance to speak to his visitors yet.

“She was perfectly normal just a few hours ago,” says Sokka.

Zuko is quiet a moment. “What if she’s in the spirit world?”

Sokka glances up, raising his eyebrows at him. “I thought only the Avatar could do that on purpose. Are you saying a spirit came and took my sister? That happened to me once.”

“Maybe,” says Zuko, feeling rather sick. “But maybe she went there on her own. My Uncle went to the spirit world, and he’s not an Avatar. It can happen.”

“Either way, it’s dangerous in there,” says Sokka, and his face is getting more frantic with every word. “Zuko, she can get hurt! What if she can’t get out? Or—or Aang told me once about this spirit that he spoke to that steals _faces_ —”

“I’m aware of the danger,” says Zuko roughly, feeling his gut clench uncomfortably. “I wish Uncle wasn’t visiting Ba Sing Se this week. He might be able to go in and find her. Where’s Aang?”

“On the other side of the world,” Sokka mutters.

Zuko does his best to ignore the fear twisting his insides. “Katara is strong,” Zuko says, gripping Sokka’s shoulder. He says it to comfort the other man, but also himself. He knows it’s true, but Zuko doesn’t like feeling helpless, especially if something like Katara’s safety may be at stake. Aang and his Uncle would never make it in time. Katara cannot stay in the spirit world too long; the longest someone did it, Zuko remembers his Uncle telling him once, was a week, and managing that and surviving apparently had been almost a miracle.

A new flare of panic clogs his chest, but Zuko smothers it down.

“We’ll wait,” says Zuko, settling on the floor and crossing his legs. He makes a hand movement to light some of the candles on Katara’s bedside table. “In the meantime, I’ll meditate and I’ll try to...go in.”

“Do you think you can?” Sokka presses. “Should I try too?”

“Have you ever meditated before?”

“Uh...no.”

Zuko gives him a brief, tired smile. “Then it’s probably pointless.”

Sokka sits beside him and crosses his legs, folding his arms and jutting out his jaw. “Well, I’m still trying.”

* * *

Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work.

And, worryingly, Katara hasn’t woken yet, even though evening is approaching.

Zuko and Sokka don’t stop trying to meditate to join her.

* * *

It happens not when he’s trying, but when he’s asleep.

Zuko knows, almost immediately, that it isn’t a regular dream.

Maybe it’s all the shimmering in his vision. It’s nearly blinding, and Zuko has to cover his eyes for a while before it fades and he can finally squint ahead.

He’s standing in a forest. It’s a strange forest, though; in a real forest, Zuko knows, things feel alive. He supposes things feel alive here too, in a way. But there’s no constant sounds of birds, no insects, no wind rustling the leaves, and that in itself is eerie.

Quite suddenly, Zuko spots a baboon meditating on a tree.

“Hey,” Zuko calls, hurrying over, though he has to pause in his tracks for a moment to duck out of the way of something swooping and screeching in the sky. “Hey! Can you help me? I’m looking for someone. A girl. She’s somewhere here.”

The baboon opens one eye. “A girl? I haven’t seen a girl. Go away.”

Zuko feels rage bubbling in his veins. Normally his fingertips might already be smoking by now, but here nothing happens. He can’t bend.

It’s been a while since he’s gotten so easily angry, but he actually _made_ it here, and Katara may be in _trouble_ , and he’ll be damned if he’s stopped by an unhelpful monkey spirit.

“I need to get to her!” he growls. “I _know_ she’s here!”

Suddenly, something shoots across the sky.

Zuko lifts his head to stare, and he’s surprised to see that while it’s soaring through the air like a comet, it looks just like the moon. “The girl with the fake moon,” says the baboon, shaking his head and squeezing his eyes shut again. “Well, what are you waiting for? Go follow it!”

Zuko doesn’t need telling twice. He sets off after the traveling celestial body at a sprint, stumbling over uneven terrain and tree roots as he goes. He fears that if he takes his eyes from the sky or slows down he’ll lose his path to possibly finding Katara.

What Zuko discovers is that the spirit world is vast. He’s panting and exhausted by the time he reaches the place where the moon has stopped and is now hovering in the sky. Above the clearing is night, but far in the distance, he can see the sky stretches into day again.

Zuko’s head spins.

The imitation moon is hovering directly above another patch of trees, and light shines down brightly into the center; into a clearing.

And then he hears Katara giggle.

Zuko starts to move forward again. “Katara!” he shouts. “Katara!”

There’s a pause. “Zuko?”

When he emerges in the clearing, Katara’s face widens into a delightful smile that makes Zuko’s heart skip a beat. “Zuko! You’re here!”

The moonlight is abnormally bright here. Of course, it’s not the actual moon, and Zuko isn’t about to make an attempt to understand what’s going on. He only knows this isn’t a dream of the spirit world, but the real thing, because Katara is here.

But she looks completely relaxed, and like she’s in no rush to leave.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” She’s beaming, gesturing around the clearing.

Glancing around, Zuko sees that the unnaturally bright light of the moon—or the moon imitation—is lighting up flowers dotting the soft grass, that behind Katara there’s a tree with drooping branches, and that fireflies are flickering behind her. For a moment he just stares at her face, which is softened and illuminated by the glowing balls of light.

His throat tightens, and he clears it with difficulty. “Yeah,” he says. “Katara, how are you here?”

“I don’t know.” She is laughing, holding out her hand and trying to catch one of the fireflies—which Zuko now realizes are abnormally large and not like fireflies in the real world at all. “I was thinking about the world and I came here.” She sounds dismissive.

Slowly, Zuko approaches her. “You’ve been here a long time,” he says. “I don’t think that’s safe. We should go.”

He holds out a hand, and Katara bites her lip as she stares at it.

Something like sadness flashes in her big blue eyes.

“Maybe you could stay?” she suggests finally, taking his hand and pulling him toward her with a hopeful smile.

“Not for long,” Zuko warns.

“One hour,” Katara says. “I want to show you some of the animals here. And the stars. The stars appear when I want them to. All I have to do is think about things, and they appear for me here, in this clearing. It’s like a place just for me.”

Zuko feels very uncomfortable with this information, though he’s not entirely sure why. “Okay,” he relents quietly. “But we should go back soon.”

Katara’s face falls a little. “Right.”

Yet another whisper of a warning clenches Zuko’s stomach.

* * *

It’s hours later that Zuko is able to tactfully extract Katara from the clearing and they wake up in the physical world once more.

Katara wakes up lying in bed as she was, and Zuko jolts up, having fallen asleep in his sitting position as he meditated. They both stare at each other a moment before Zuko reaches over and shakes Sokka awake, as he’d also fallen asleep sitting up. Sokka starts and looks wildly around for a moment before his eyes fall on Katara, who is just watching him quietly.

“Katara!” Sokka scrambles up to hug her. “You're okay!”

She returns the hug halfheartedly. “I was fine, Sokka. I really liked it there.”

And that, Zuko comes to realize over the next few days, is precisely the problem.

* * *

Zuko becomes more reluctant to go to his various meetings as it becomes abundantly clear that something is wrong with Katara. When he’s not attending to Fire Lord duties he spends all the time he can with her and Sokka, and he sees it.

She’s downcast. The gleam in her eyes is missing. She doesn’t smile like she used to. When she does smile, it’s halfhearted and it fades as soon as she thinks no one is looking. He thinks back to their last visit a few weeks ago and remembers that she’d been more subdued then, too. He’d chalked it up to the difficulties that she’d told him about as she helped rebuild and reshape the Southern Water Tribe, dealing with the after effects of the war, and negotiating with their sister tribe.

Zuko endures it for two days before he decides to go talk to her. He isn’t able to break away from his responsibilities until evening, and when he knocks on her door, he doesn’t get an answer. After knocking relentlessly, he hurries off to find Sokka, and when her brother affirms that he hasn’t seen Katara either, they rush back to her room and Sokka goes in first, with Zuko hesitating before Sokka waves him in.

Katara is, once again, out cold on her bed.

He and Sokka drag out the meditation pillows and try, in vain, to enter the spirit world.

This time Zuko wakes up in the morning without having gone into the spirit world in his sleep.

And he knows that Katara is still there, in her clearing, with her fake celestial bodies above her and the otherworldly fireflies around her, the ones that come into existence to make her happy, and Zuko suddenly fears she won’t come out.

“Sokka,” Zuko says hoarsely, shaking him awake.

Sokka's eyes fly open, and he quickly stands up to peer at Katara. His shoulders slump. “You weren’t able to go in either, huh?”

“No.” Zuko’s grip tightens momentarily on Sokka’s shoulder. “Sokka, is something...did something happen? To Katara?”

Sokka glances at him. “Why would you ask that?”

“She’s different,” says Zuko. “She’s...”

_Sad. Depressed. Lifeless._

But he doesn’t need to finish the sentence. Sokka seems to know because he sighs, still staring at his sister. “Yeah. I’ve noticed too. Honestly, I thought this trip would help.” There’s a pause. “Was she safe in there?”

Zuko scratches the back of his neck. “Well...yeah. But it was really hard to convince her to leave.”

“Maybe if we just give her some time,” says Sokka.

They hardly leave her room.

Zuko meets with advisors, but returns nearly every hour to see if Katara has returned.

But as the day drags on, she remains firmly out of their reach, in the spirit world.

Katara has been in the spirit world for nearly two whole days—the two boys have already sent a desperate hawk to Aang and Iroh, positively frantic, and tried almost the whole time to join her—when she finally wakes up with a little gasp. Sokka pulls her into a hug, and Zuko helps her up to escort her to get some food. He can feel her shaking against his side, and there are tears in her eyes when he peers down at her as they walk down the hall.

The next evening, however, Katara is already gone yet again.

“She’s going to hurt herself,” says Sokka, pacing the room.

Zuko yanks the meditation pillow toward him again and sits beside the bed, his face twisted in a scowl. “I’ll get to her tonight.”

Sokka stops and stares at him. “You’re exhausted. You have Fire Lord things to do. We should take turns sleeping and trying to get in.”

“No offense, but you’re probably not getting in, Sokka,” Zuko says brusquely. “I’ll stay up. It’s fine. It’s even nearing the solstice,” he continues, his eyes firmly planted on Katara. His voice is fierce and rasping. “So that makes it even more likely that I can get into the spirit world again. I've done it before. I’ll get to her, Sokka. I’ll meditate all night if I have to.”

There’s a long, heavy silence.

“Zuko,” Sokka finally murmurs, a knowing lilt to his voice, “How long have you been in love with my sister?”

* * *

Zuko does reach the spirit world through meditation that night.

It takes him much longer to find Katara, because he doesn’t have her personal moon to follow as it cuts across the sky, as he did on his first trip here. But Zuko is still good at moving through landscapes and being resourceful, even if it’s been months since he’s actually had to do it, and eventually he sees it glimmering in the distance, above the little patch of trees that he knows to be hers.

It’s pouring rain inside the clearing. There are no fireflies this time. Katara is sitting on the ground, her back against the tree, and she only looks up and notices him when a twig snaps under Zuko’s foot as he cautiously approaches her.

Katara gives one of those brief smiles that doesn’t reach her eyes as he sits beside her. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I would keep the rain away so you could stay dry, but I can’t bend here.”

“I know. That’s okay.” The rain is already flattening his hair to his skull, and he sweeps some wet strands out of his face and peers down at her.

She sighs. “You didn’t have to come after me, Zuko.”

He sits down beside her. “I think I did. Do you want to...talk about it?”

Katara leans back further and stares into the clearing with a dull expression on her face. “I guess I thought things would be easier,” she says. “I know how stupid and naive that sounds.” She drags her knees to her chest, her blue eyes slightly unfocused. “I didn’t expect it to be _easy_ , I just...I thought people would want to get along more after all the war. I thought they would cooperate better. And I thought I would feel more at peace, especially with being at home again. But I’m not. I don't know what I'm doing, Zuko. I don't know where I'm needed anymore.”

Zuko holds out an arm, and she scoots into his side and rests his head on his shoulder. “You’ve had a long time where you haven’t rested,” Zuko points out. “It’s okay to need a break, Katara. You can take a break in the physical world, too.”

“I don’t want to be in that world right now.” Her voice wavers. “I thought I’d like it more by now. I’m not _wanting_ to run away. It's so stupid. I just thought—I thought I’d be more—certain of things.” She draws in a shuddering breath. “You must think I’m awful.”

“Of course I don’t,” he says gently.

The rain lessens ever so slightly.

“You spent a whole year putting the group’s needs before your own. All of you did. It was necessary to survive. And now you’re putting your tribe’s needs before yours, Katara. But if you aren’t well, you can’t help others. You just need a bit of rest. To do some things just because _you_ need them.”

She sighs again and tucks herself even closer, and Zuko feels his heart jump in his chest. He has to restrain from burying his head in her hair.

“Can’t we just stay here?” Katara whispers.

Zuko’s heart clenches.

“No. It's not safe.” He reaches up to run his hands through her hair. “Please come back with me, Katara. And please stay there. If you want to leave home for a bit, you’re always welcome to stay in the Fire Nation. I, uh, realize that probably isn’t what you want either...”

“I don’t know what I want,” she admits.

“Well, you always have a home with me if you want it,” says Zuko.

He can tell that she’s smiling by the tone of her voice.

The rain has ceased falling completely, and a few fireflies have appeared.

“I know,” she murmurs.

* * *

Katara allows Zuko to lead her out of the spirit world for a second time.

Sokka is curled up on the floor, snoring, and Katara giggles.

“Thank you,” she tells Zuko then, staring up at him.

Looking at her is like looking at the sun. Zuko fights the urge to take her face in his hands and reverently run his fingers over her cheekbones and kiss her breathless, but he wonders if she sees something on his face anyway when her eyes flicker.

His throat goes dry. “Anytime," he says quickly. "I’ll, uh, go to bed now.”

And though he leaves and goes straight to his room, it takes him a long time to fall asleep.

He’s awake early the next morning to see if Katara is still in the physical world, and he’s relieved when she’s present at breakfast.

“I think,” says Katara, “I’d like to stay here a while, Sokka.”

“Cool,” Sokka says, piling food on his plate. He shoots Zuko a furtively questioning look, to which Zuko just shrugs, though the Fire Lord is unable to contain his smile and hides it with a sip of his juice. “Do you know how long?”

“No,” says Katara simply. “Not yet.”

Zuko hopes she’ll stay a while.

He knows that after some time, after she’s had some rest and her period of self-discovery and some recovery, he’ll have to tell her how he feels. He’s been putting it off for too long, and it’s beginning to feel like the unsaid words are smothering him.

When Katara smiles at Sokka and then at him, Zuko feels warm all over when he notes that this one reaches her eyes.

For now, he’s happy to wait before he complicates things. To give her time.

He’ll continue doing his part to make this world better; for his nation, for his people, for his friends.

For Katara.


End file.
